After eating the cooked grubs—which Trey had to admit were delicious—and the stripped and kneaded pirate plant flesh, the two of them divided Alishia’s belongings between their shoulder bags and set out westward.

They walked in silence for several hours, Alishia darting on ahead now and then, looking around, splashing in streams, lifting rocks, tasting moss from upturned stones. Trey did not comment; he assumed that this was her way of traveling, navigating their position, keeping track of where they were. She had a map rolled up in her pack, and although it had looked detailed in part, there were still vast tracts left uncharted to the south, east and north, the far-flung places of Noreela that even in his dreams he could barely imagine.

She was poor company. Sometimes she displayed pity and sorrow, but mostly she fueled her own apparently bottomless desire for knowledge and sensation. She had told him that she was a librarian. Trey had seen books, although not many, and he could not comprehend someone spending their life in a building virtually made of them. She had tried to communicate to him how the worlds she knew were alive in books, but Trey did not understand. Here was the world, and they were in it. Reality was doing its best to blind him with its brashness, terrify him with its size and light and multitudinous variations.

He tried walking with his eyes closed for long periods, but after the first few falls he gave up. Besides, the sun still found its way through. He wondered if he would ever see total darkness again.

For most of the day they walked across the plains with no real destination in mind. Then late in the afternoon Alishia stopped and waited for Trey to catch up, glancing back at him, smiling, her eyes sparkling with exhilaration.

“Swallow hole,” she said. “See there?” She pointed, although Trey had already seen. How could he not?

Sometimes in the rivers belowground, at places where they slowed and pondered in wide caverns before moving on once again, there were whirlpools; spinning sinkholes opening beneath the river and sucking its waters deeper, deeper into the earth to places no man or fledger had ever been. He had never seen one but he had heard of them, sitting wide-eyed and fascinated as his father told him tales of how these whirlpools could swallow a man whole, and how sometimes they did. These men were still sinking, his father had said, still spinning, drowned now but their journey downward never-ending, the water keeping their corpses fresh for discovery by whatever waited at the bottom.

This swallow hole was like one of those whirlpools, except that it existed in rock.